1950s-Era Spaceship and Space Station
In the 1955 film “Conquest of Space,” the massive Mars-bound spaceship is assembled and built in Earth orbit next to the wheel-shaped space station. Astronauts and personnel used the space station as an assembly base and operations hub before taking off on their interplanetary voyage. The movie was grounded in the cutting-edge science of its era and heavily adapted from the works of real-world aerospace pioneers like Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Chesley Bonestell.
At the time, scientists calculated that escaping Earth's gravity required an enormous amount of fuel. They believed it was mathematically impossible for a single, unified rocket to launch from Earth, fly all the way to Mars, and land. The only logical solution back then was to use smaller "shuttle" rockets to ferry raw parts to a space station and build a massive, fragile, specialized ship in zero gravity that would never have to withstand an atmospheric launch.
However, for a trip to Mars, modern aerospace engineers favor launching a factory-built ship from Earth and simply refueling it in orbit, rather than assembling the physical hull piece-by-piece near a space station. Sending humans to weld in space is dangerous and expensive. Instead of building the ship in space, we launch a complete ship from Earth and use orbital tankers to refill its gas tank in orbit before it leaves for Mars.
1950s-Era Spaceship and Space Station
In the 1955 film “Conquest of Space,” the massive Mars-bound spaceship is assembled and built in Earth orbit next to the wheel-shaped space station. Astronauts and personnel used the space station as an assembly base and operations hub before taking off on their interplanetary voyage. The movie was grounded in the cutting-edge science of its era and heavily adapted from the works of real-world aerospace pioneers like Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Chesley Bonestell.
At the time, scientists calculated that escaping Earth's gravity required an enormous amount of fuel. They believed it was mathematically impossible for a single, unified rocket to launch from Earth, fly all the way to Mars, and land. The only logical solution back then was to use smaller "shuttle" rockets to ferry raw parts to a space station and build a massive, fragile, specialized ship in zero gravity that would never have to withstand an atmospheric launch.
However, for a trip to Mars, modern aerospace engineers favor launching a factory-built ship from Earth and simply refueling it in orbit, rather than assembling the physical hull piece-by-piece near a space station. Sending humans to weld in space is dangerous and expensive. Instead of building the ship in space, we launch a complete ship from Earth and use orbital tankers to refill its gas tank in orbit before it leaves for Mars.